This fall, Amazon built a virtual supercomputer atop its Elastic
Compute Cloud — a web service that spins up virtual servers whenever you
want them — and this nonexistent mega-machine outraced all but 41 of the world’s real supercomputers.

Yes, beneath Amazon’s virtual supercomputer, there’s real hardware.
When all is said and done, it’s a cluster of machines, like any other
supercomputer. But that virtual layer means something. This isn’t a
supercomputer that Amazon uses for its own purposes. It’s a
supercomputer that can be used by anyone.

Amazon is the poster child for the age of cloud computing. Alongside
their massive e-tail business, Jeff Bezos and company have built a worldwide network of data centers that gives anyone instant access to all sorts of computing resources,
including not only virtual servers but virtual storage and all sorts of
other services that can be accessed from any machine on the net. This
global infrastructure is so large, it can run one of the fastest
supercomputers on earth — even as it’s running thousands upon thousands
of other virtual servers for the world’s businesses and developers.

This not only shows the breadth of Amazon’s service. It shows that in
the internet age, just about anyone can run a supercomputer-sized
application without actually building a supercomputer. “If you wanted to
spin up a ten or twenty thousand [processor] core cluster, you could do
it with a single mouse click,” says Jason Stowe, the CEO of Cycle Computing,
an outfit that helps researchers and businesses run supercomputing
applications atop EC2. “Fluid dynamics simulations. Molecular dynamics
simulations. Financial analysis. Risk analysis. DNA sequencing. All of
those things can run exceptionally well atop the [Amazon EC2
infrastructure].”